Many students look through PASS (Plan a Student Schedule) every quarter searching for the best schedule, but beyond this, some students discover and sign up for the most bizarre classes.
Among these odd classes are introduction to meat science, biofuels, rhetoric of the image, modern physics for poets and cooperative games and activities.
Cooperative games and activities, though only a one-unit kinesiology class, teaches students games that are non-violent and include everyone in a respectful way.
Kinesiology senior Alexa Frear called it her professional tag class.
“The syllabus said we were going to play games for the whole quarter and that is exactly what we did,” Frear said. “It was basically like being in preschool and that is why it was weird.”
For her final project, Alexa and her teammate brought giant toothpicks and bubblegum, and everyone had five minutes to chew as much as they could and make something.
Frear said she learned how simple activities can brighten somebody’s day and help a group of different people bond with each other.
One activity in particular ended up helping her out in her professional career.
Frear, who was a human resources intern at Community Action Partnership of San Luis Obispo (CAPSLO) at one point, used a game she learned from the class to kick off one of the department meetings she attended.
“Everybody has a piece of paper with their name on it. Each person passes it around the table and writes down something nice about that person until their paper comes back to them,” she said. “The only rule is no bullying.”
Less about fun and games, biofuels is an environmental engineering class that is typically only offered to master’s and doctorate candidates, environmental engineering senior Justin Kraetsch said. Kraetsch also said Cal Poly is one of the only public universities to offer the class; it’s typically only offered at private universities.
Cal Poly students learned to make biodiesel, ethanol and biogas during the quarter.
Kraetsch said biofuels are the technology of the future.
The class made biodiesel from sunflower seeds and completed an engineering feasibility report for a scenario in which Cal Poly grows crops to turn into fuel to power its campus tractors, Kraetsch said.
They also made ethanol from sugar beets. Farmers in the midwest make their own using corn waste and power their cars this way, Kraetsch said.
“We buy syrup from Germany and pretty much made moonshine,” Kraetsch said.
The product would have been able to power any non-diesel engine if they had put it to test.
Finally, they made biogas from breakfast, lunch and dinner waste collected from Campus Market and created a scenario in which they would try to power every Cal Poly building.
They couldn’t yield enough waste to feasibly power every building on campus, which is why it was merely a class scenario.
The next class, introduction to meat science, isn’t for those with weak stomachs, former Cal Poly student Chantalle Little said.
“It was a required course for my animal science major and I had to choose between that and poultry science, and didn’t feel like cutting off a chicken’s head at that point,” Little said.
She learned about qualities of meat and beef and even carved half of a cow carcass. Though she didn’t eat any, the class made hotdogs from meat scraps and smoked them after. All the meats were sold by Cal Poly meats.
“I felt proud learning to cut meat properly,” Little said. “I didn’t know there was a proper way.”
Students were required to have their hair pulled back and in a hair net, wear gloves and rubber boots that reached their knees and remove all jewelry.
Despite the hands-on aspect of this class, Little said she would recommend this class to all animal science majors and even to kinesiology students who would benefit from seeing the science of how muscles work.
On the arts side of the spectrum, liberal arts engineering senior Jeff Franklin took a unique rhetoric of the image class. The focus was reading comic books and learning to better understand them.
A picture is worth a thousand words, Franklin said.
“I want to understand how people interpret images,” Franklin said. “Being that I’m in a designer role, I deal with images everyday.”
This last class is a mix of science and poetry. Economics senior Kevin Clancy took modern physics for poets.
He signed up for the class because it fulfilled a science general education requirement, but ended up getting a lot more out of it, he said.
They learned about theoretical physics, Einstein’s theory about the speed of light, black holes, warp holes and time travel.
Clancy said he enjoyed how the class tied in religious ideas and allowed him to adopt a new way of thinking.
“A skill I acquired was the ability to take a different perspective on very technical mathematical topics, understand them conceptually and be able to use that understanding to theorize without actually knowing any of the math behind it,” Clancy said.